


Zero hour

by bluebells



Series: Ceasefire [9]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Comfort, Exhaustion, M/M, Melancholy, Sleepy Sex, What happens in Illios stays in Illios
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-06 02:06:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13401171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebells/pseuds/bluebells
Summary: Their breaths ring harshly in the dark and, maybe for the first time since this whole thing started, they don't need words.





	Zero hour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hirocket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hirocket/gifts).



> Written for the prompt: “I don’t want to do this without you." Set directly after the events of [_Choosing sides_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13369830).
> 
> Thank you to rockscanfly for the sanity check! My words can get away from me, I appreciate people who tap me on the shoulder like, "Rein it in."

The cloudy horizon over Illios is a smear of burning peach and bronze when Lúcio staggers over the threshold of the motel room.

"Motel" is an underrated term for their stone cottage in the seaside township of Illios. It rises from the cliff's plateau on a curve of stairs, potted blooms of cherry and magenta bougainvillea cresting each floating bridge and doorframe. The first time Lúcio saw the town, he was enchanted by the proud Mediterranean vista, probably like every tourist who came through the region, wondering how such a place had been spared the devastation of the Omnic Crisis.

When he started meeting Akande here, Illios turned from a retreat to a secret refuge. A dozen surveillance and safety measures now line this cottage and surrounding grounds to warn of oncoming thoroughfare from land, sky and sea. A dozen more are seeded through the town, down and up the surrounding lanes of neighbouring dwellings. These are just the precautions _Lúcio_ has put in place. With no doubt, Akande has installed his own.

And as much as it keeps others out, it entraps them within. Tonight, Lúcio is feeling it.

The breeze is balmy and humid. Blowing in through open wooden shutters, it carries only the gulls' cries and the crash of waves; an intimate ambience for an autumn evening.

Lúcio is too exhausted to appreciate any of what used to charm and relax him about this place. His mind is abuzz with static, limbs jittery with fatigue of his eighteen hour interrogation and three hour flight in an airship enclosed with Fareeha's hostile silence.

Lúcio barely casts an eye to the tall figure moving in the kitchen as he drops his duffel bag in one of the wooden chairs by the small dining table. He finds the object of his search almost immediately -- Akande’s belongings: a narrow backpack, the corner of a tablet peeking from the open top.

Pots and dishes clink in the left of his periphery, a mechanical beep and whirr before he hears the rush of water in a porcelain sink. Lúcio slips his phone from his pocket, glancing from the corner of his eye to the relaxed outline of Akande’s shoulders, back still turned to him. It’s a significant show of trust.

Lúcio enables the data sync program as he was instructed, holding the phone low against his thigh until the interface spins green to notify a successful link with all neighbouring devices inside a fifteen metre range.

_Downloading…._

He locks the phone, tossing it in the bottom of his bag to complete its work out of sight and out of mind.

That’s it. The uplink speed to Athena’s mobile server will finish the job within minutes.

He can turn around and leave right now if he wants to.

"I'm gonna lie down for a minute," he calls by way of greeting, voice thick and slurred hoarse. He heads straight for the open door to the sole bedroom, kicking his shoes off, shedding clothing with every step until he's stripped down to his underwear. He’s itching to escape his own skin, and he’s just planted a knee on the bed when a thick arm curls under his shoulders from behind. A tired sigh tries to rise in his throat, but he quashes it mercilessly and finds the energy for a small smile when he’s drawn back against narrow hips. He turns, and Akande is already leaning down with a bemused curl of a smile; _you didn’t think I’d let you go without saying ‘hello’, did you?_

Lúcio sways with their kiss, kneeling on the bed with Akande standing before him, and their bodies slot together; the easiest of learned muscle memory. The tear of velcro is abruptly harsh as Lúcio lets Akande strip his fingerless gloves, throwing them over his shoulder towards the dining table.

Lúcio stops those hands when they hook into the band of his briefs. “It was a long trip. Just need to rest my head. Yeah?”

“Are you well?” Akande’s hand cups his face. Lúcio forces himself not to break from the concerned frown that searches him, resisting the urge to swallow nervously.

“Tired.”

‘Wrecked’ feels more accurate.

Akande kisses his forehead. “Then rest. I’ll keep watch.”

_The jackals pace the boundary, even now._

The moment Lúcio sinks down on his front, his body dissolves with a weary groan of relief, palms pressing flat above his head to fist in the stiff cotton duvet. His senses fill with fresh scents of laundered cotton and lavender, a large, warm hand passes down his back, and he's unconscious before his head hits the pillow.

///

Lúcio dreams only of darkness, a blissful void stretching on ahead and behind him, above and below, unaware and unworried of what waits for him when he should wake.

Rousing from sleep is like drawing a deep breath, emerging from that heavy, black slumber to vague awareness as his lungs expand, and when he exhales, he is blinking awake at an unfamiliar wall and closed wooden shutters.

For a slow stretch of time, Lucio has no idea where he is or why he's there. Instincts honed from years of skimming through the crowding, jagged corridors of his favela fail to report any signs of imminent danger to his sleep-drugged mind. He is warm, dry, his body is relaxed, and a subconscious part of him knows this is a blessing -- a short reprieve from whatever has made his body so leaden.

The room is dim, a soft, warm glow diffusing from a source at his back.

Sometime during his sleep, he cocooned himself in the bed's thin but heavy duvet. It slides from his shoulders as he stretches, air escaping in a groan as he reaches ahead with stiff arms -- then grunts when the bone _cracks_ low in his hips. He rolls onto his back, staring up at the ceiling, and brings one knee up high and over the opposite hip to stretch his hips. Throwing his arms out for balance, his left elbow smacks into something warm and solid.

He cranes his head back to regard the man sitting up against the bed's headboard, reading by the light of the bedside lamp.

Dressed in a dark tanktop and loose pants, Akande is studying something on a hand-held tablet that casts his face in a pale glow. He is so focused that he reaches for Lúcio's shoulder to rub the joint in comfort; only after a long moment, do his eyes drag from his study to find Lúcio's face.

Akande blinks at him, then huffs a quiet chuckle, the ghost of a smile touching his lips at whatever he sees staring back at him. His hand shifts from Lúcio's shoulder, sweeping aside a few thick dreadlocks that had fallen across his face, and strokes a thumb over his forehead.

Lúcio blinks at him sleepily. "What time is it?"

"Ten," Akande says, low and gentle.

Ten? He slept for five hours?

Lúcio grunts in the effort of rolling over, limbs heavy as he pulls himself up the bed by his elbows and flops against Akande's thigh, head resting on his hip. The bunched cotton of Akande's pants is soft beneath his cheek and smells of the same detergent that Lúcio now recognises in all of Akande's clothes.

Talon has nice detergent, it smells like... 2AM Summer down at the laundromats, the nice ones he and his Mama had to walk an extra street for, but it was worth the distance because the machines only faulted a third of the time and the owners always smiled, bright and cheered to see them. They were the couple who gave Lúcio his first pair of skates.

"Mmm?" He grunts, gently nudged back awake by the hand on his shoulder.

"Are you hungry?" Akande asks, and Lúcio suspects not for the first time.

Lúcio’s eyes slide shut again. He squirms closer, throwing a leg over Akande's knee. "Mmm," he sighs, long and heavy in contentment as his body relaxes against the man tolerating his weight like a limpet.

Food. What a good idea. He should eat. He _will_ eat. It's been roughly eight hours since his last meal, and he would have been hungry when he walked into this cottage if not for....

It feels like only a moment later that Lúcio blinks in sharper awareness, and realises he must have fallen asleep again.

This time, the room is pitch dark and Akande is on his back, fast asleep beside him, a thick arm thrown out across their pillows. Lúcio sits up from where he tucked himself against the man's side. He squints until he finds the large bottle of water Akande always keeps by his bedside and reaches over the man to drain his fill. The water does much to ease the taut itch in his throat and loosen the stiffness in his limbs.

The room is silent but for Akande’s deep, steady breaths and the distant hush of the waves’ rise and break against the cliffs below.

He feels it when he sets the bottle back -- the clock ticking down over his head. But here, in this cottage, the night feels deep enough to hide them, the darkness hanging like a heavy shroud of security around his shoulders, soothing him back down to the bed in willful ignorance for the hour.

They gave him a day. It's a kindness he doesn't deserve. Fareeha will not come looking for him until next dusk, and Lúcio knows that if she has to, the Air Commander will be wearing her armour.

It won't come to that.

Lúcio sighs, finding Akande's shoulder by touch and rests his head on the stretched pectoral muscle, pressing himself flush against the man's side. He has never been awake while the other man slept. Akande was too vigilant to expose his back to others, waking or asleep. The few times they had dozed together, the man was always awake and out of bed whenever Lúcio returned to his senses -- most recently when Akande slid back into bed with a gold circlet for Lúcio’s wrist.

His hand idles from Akande's warm pectoral muscle to the jut of his collarbone. The circlet bumps against his wristbone, warmed by skin.

He thinks about the promise he made to Akande that dawn in Oasis as the man kneeled on the bed before him, waiting for Lucio’s reaction with the closest emotion the DJ had ever seen to anxiety as Lúcio stared at the circlet in his hands. He still doesn’t understand what he did along the way to coax Akande into the idea that this soft thing between them is sustainable, but he likes it -- _liked_ it.

(Has to orient himself with the idea of a past tense, the clock is ticking.)

And Akande was a better listener than people gave him credit for.

 _“There are other ways,”_ Lúcio had told him. _“Vishkar. Brussels. Lijiang. I’ll help you. But we do things_ my _way.”_

To be strict, Akande had not explicitly agreed. Physical affection did not a contract make, even though Akande excelled at flexing it as a distraction.

Lúcio strokes light lines up and down the stretched tendon of Akande's neck, curls his finger up the shell of his ear, feeling the smooth, steel bolt at his temple where his skull was reinforced after the decisive brawl with his previous mentor. Lúcio knows that if he pushes his hand down Akande’s spine, he’ll find a dozen more bolts like it.  

Akande’s body is a constant work in progress, a weapon honed for combat.

 _For the coming war,_ he had said.

Lúcio’s heart is heavy and he feels as much as he hears the moment Akande stirs under his hand, breathing shifting from the slow, deep pace of sleep to lighter wakefulness.

Lúcio is still mostly asleep. It feels natural to lean in, closing the breath of distance and pressing his mouth against Akande's. Akande doesn't react, most likely still waking. The dark gives Lúcio courage to take another kiss-- it feels like saying _hello_ , a slow brush of lips, welcome in its familiarity. It's easy. It's _comforting_ , and it eases some of the weary ache swelling in his chest.

Lúcio's hand comes up to cup Akande's jaw as he licks over those thick lips, lightly suckling the lower between his teeth, and finally Akande inhales against him, stirred to motion.

The arm Akande had flung across the pillow folds up behind Lúcio's head. Fingers gently tangle in loose dreadlocks as Akande’s other hand closes low on his hip. Akande kisses him back, blind in the dark, and it feels like puzzle pieces slotting together in a way they never have before.

When Lúcio rides him, it's a slow and languid grind, hips rolling as Akande braces his feet on the mattress, rising to meet him. Lúcio groans, head falling back, and he clutches at the hands that cup the back of his neck and slide in firm strokes over his cock.

Their breaths ring harshly in the dark and, maybe for the first time since this whole thing started, they don't need words. There is no teasing, no begging nor encouragement -- they seek each other by touch, and Akande growls low in satisfaction when he spills inside, hands gripping Lúcio's thighs tight. Lúcio groans, bucking at the feeling of the thick girth pulsing inside him, and it should feel like heaven, but this time….

This time--

Akande pulls him down by the circlet on his wrist, and their kiss is a complete mess: wet, open-mouthed and _yearning_ \--

Lúcio buckles at the hot, dull pain that clenches in his chest, and in the same moment, his release wrenches from him as a sob, high and sharp. A sob that hitches into another, and he sits back on Akande’s hips, hands flying to his mouth in a poor attempt to stifle the sound of the air shuddering from him in wet gasps, as if someone with Akande’s powers of perception would not know this difference.

For the first time, Lúcio is grateful that Akande is not a man who forces explanations from him because Lúcio can't remember the last time he cried during sex.

It's not humiliating but terrifying for the void that has yawned open in him, that leaves him weeping brokenly against Akande's chest because the jackals are circling, the gold is heavy on Lúcio’s wrist, and what is he going to do? He can't -- can’t do this--

Akande's mouth hums reassuringly against his temple. "I have you," he murmurs, one hand holding Lúcio's by his hip as the other strokes warm lines up and down his back, "It's all right." He raises Lúcio's face to kiss his forehead, murmuring words in a language Lúcio doesn't understand, thumbs clearing the hot, wet smears of tears from his cheeks.

Akande draws him down to be held against his chest, and Lúcio clings, trembling.

"I'm with you," Akande promises, arms tight around him.

Lúcio bites down on his whimper and instead remembers that when he insisted, "We do things my way, okay? Promise me -- _promise,"_ Akande had not said 'yes'.

Akande is Talon and Talon have their own agenda. Thanks to Lucio, Overwatch may now have learned it, too.

Not since Vishkar has he so dreaded the dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> [The warbling blog](https://bellsyblue.tumblr.com) / [the writing blog](https://bellsybuilds.tumblr.com).


End file.
